There is an ongoing demand to provide higher and higher performance for electronic systems, for example computer systems, within racking. Often there is an increase in the heat generated by equipment as the performance of the equipment increases. In order to provide effective cooling, it is necessary to provide paths whereby cooling air can be passed over heat generating components and then be removed from the equipment. In a rack mounted system, it is generally desirable to draw cool air in from the front of the racking and to expel the air warmed by the heat generating components from the rear of the racking.
One common way of providing high performance in a scalable manner is to provide a backplane (e.g. a motherboard) with a plurality of connectors for receiving subsystems (e.g. daughterboards). The various subsystems mounted on the backplane will generally interact with the other subsystems mounted on the backplane to enable a complete system of a the desired performance to be implemented. The mounted subsystems can represent different components of the complete system, or alternatively two or more of the subsystems could be the same as each other.
A problem arises of how to configure such systems while still providing for adequate cooling. Typically, for convenience, rack-mountable components are mounted from the front of the racking, and the backplane is located at the back of the racking. Consequently, as a subsystem is fully inserted into the racking, the connectors on the subsystem will naturally engage the corresponding connectors on the backplane.
As indicated above, it is normally desirable for the cooling air to be drawn from the front of the racking and to be expelled from the rear of the racking. However, when the backplane is placed at the rear of the racking, this blocks the simple route for the cooling air from the front to the rear of the racking. This results in having to provide more complex paths for the cooling air, which can reduce the cooling efficiency and also increase noise. It is therefore desirable to be able to improve the configuration of rack-mountable systems in such a manner that better accommodates effective and efficient cooling.